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Fusion Science and Technology
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Glass strategy: Hanford’s enhanced waste glass program
The mission of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection (ORP) is to complete the safe cleanup of waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons development. One of the most technologically challenging responsibilities is the safe disposition of approximately 56 million gallons of radioactive waste historically stored in 177 tanks at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
ORP has a clear incentive to reduce the overall mission duration and cost. One pathway is to develop and deploy innovative technical solutions that can advance baseline flow sheets toward higher efficiency operations while reducing identified risks without compromising safety. Vitrification is the baseline process that will convert both high-level and low-level radioactive waste at Hanford into a stable glass waste form for long-term storage and disposal.
Although vitrification is a mature technology, there are key areas where technology can further reduce operational risks, advance baseline processes to maximize waste throughput, and provide the underpinning to enhance operational flexibility; all steps in reducing mission duration and cost.
K. Nagaoka, Y. Takeiri, S. Morita, K. Ida, M. Yokoyama, M. Yoshinuma, H. Funaba, S. Murakami, T. Minami, K. Tanaka, T. Ido, A. Shimizu, K. Ikeda, M. Osakabe, K. Tsumori, O. Kaneko, LHD Experiment Group
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 58 | Number 1 | July-August 2010 | Pages 46-52
Chapter 3. Confinement and Transport | Special Issue on Large Helical Device (LHD) | doi.org/10.13182/FST58-46
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Ion heating experiments have been intensively carried out in high- and low-Zeff conditions of Large Helical Device plasmas. In high-Zeff plasmas utilizing neon or argon gus puffing, the ion heating power normalized by ion density (Pi /ni) increases with ZeffL and the central ion temperature increases with Pi /ni without saturation. The central ion temperature of 13.5 kV was achieved in an argon-seeded plasma, strongly suggesting the capability of the helical configuration to confine high-performance plasmas. In low-Zeff experiments, improvement of ion heat transport was realized in the core plasmas heated by high-power neutral beam injections. The ion temperature has a peaked profile with steep gradient in the core region (ion internal transport barrier). The transport analysis indicates that the anomalous transport is reduced in the core region, where the negative radial electric field is predicted by the neoclassical ambipolarity. Improvement of ion heat transport with positive radial electric field was also successfully demonstrated utilizing strongly focused electron cyclotron resonant heating, suggesting further improvement of ion heat transport in reactor-relevant plasmas.